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Review of 'Savages'

Review of 'Savages'

The death of a rain forest is one of those tragedies we know about as news, but we don't mourn such news the way we mourn the death of a friend. Even the most haunting visual images of slashed-and-burned wastelands or oil- blackened rivers in the jungle tend to shock the eyes but numb the heart. It is one of the paradoxes of modern global media, such as television, that the more they make us aware of our world, the less intimate that awareness becomes.

Joe Kane is a writer with the sense to know that tragedy without intimacy is mere information and with the skill to show us the loss of a rain forest as the loss of many friends. In Savages he takes us with him into the heart of the Ecuadorian rain forest, in a quest to understand the people who live there. His portrait of the Huaorani (pronounced wow-rah-NEE) as they face destruction by the operations of an American oil company is as gripping as a Conrad novel, full of strong characters and wild landscapes. Some literary critics believe that the traditional novel is being replaced by what they have called the nonfiction novel; if so, Joe Kane's Savages is a classic example of the genre.

Kane was working for an environmental organization, the Rainforest Action Network, when the Huaorani became the center of a political dispute: in a petition to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund charged that oil drilling on Huaorani land would be ethnocide, "that for the sake of enough oil to meet U.S. energy needs for thirteen days, the Huaorani way of life would be destroyed." Other environmental groups were trying to work out deals on behalf of the Huaorani and fighting among themselves for control of funds the oil companies might set aside to help the tribe. Still other interests, including missionaries, politicians and land-hungry colonists, were pressing for access to the Huaorani heartland. But, with the exception of a few individuals, none of these groups had ever in fact met the Huaorani face-to-face. "For all the ruckus being raised," Kane writes, "no one knew what the Huaorani wanted. No one really knew who the Huaorani were."

Kane left his job and went to Ecuador to find out. He first met a few leaders in the town of Coca. Then, despite threats from a local military commander who denied him permission to visit the Huaorani interior, he slipped past an army checkpoint into the jungle in a truck loaded with Huaoranis who were hanging from the sides and piled on top of him. In his very first encounter with them, Kane caught the spirit of a people trying to grasp the modern world in terms of the ancient forest. At a Coca hotel he met Amo and Enqueri:

[Enqueri] had hardly any teeth at all, and he was wearing a pair of headphones that appeared to be plugged into his right hip pocket. When I asked him what he was listening to, he replied in a tone so solemn I was sure I had committed a horrible breach of Huaorani etiquette. "I am listening," he said, "to my pants." He let that hang for a moment, and then he and Amo collapsed with laughter, rolling on the ground and cackling wildly.

With them was a young warrior named Moi, who seemed to have the clearest vision of his tribe's impending fate. The Huaorani had elected these men to protect their way of life from the Company (a name they used for all the oil companies and their various allies). But they had no office, no phone and no money. When Kane asked what they proposed to do, Moi answered softly, "We will find the Company and talk to them. If they do not listen, we will attack with spears from all sides."

Kane spent the better part of two years with the Huaorani, visiting their villages and taking an apartment in Quito, where they visited him from time to time. He shared their way of life and began to understand it. At first the jungle was an ordeal he would barely survive: "Enqueri announced that we would walk until 'five minutes after five.' This puzzled me-it was true that he wore a watch, but it didn't work. In any case we walked for perhaps ten hours, during which I fell, slid, and stumbled and got stung, bit, and branch-whipped so often that by the time Enqueri announced, 'Five minutes after five,' I had no idea of direction or distance, of where we were or even where we were going."

A year or so later he could see things differently, in the company of a Huaorani elder named Mengatohue: "Walking in the forest with him was like visiting an immense library with a master librarian. No matter how seemingly wild, every patch of ground had a history. Here he had planted chonta palm that in the time of Moi's children would provide wood for spears. Here balsa had reclaimed an old manioc garden and would be harvested for earplugs and rafts. Here a man had been spear-killed; here a jaguar appeared now and then. Here were plants for treating snakebite, diarrhea, skin rash. Here a patch of the hallucinogen ayahuasca that would soon be ready to brew into tea. I began to see the forest not as wild and unknown but as managed and inventoried, shaped and maintained by man as much as it shaped and maintained him."